A former Alaska Department of Corrections employee is charged with illegally supplying a drug to treat opioid addiction to an inmate at Wildwood Pretrial Facility in Kenai. The state is also accusing her and another former Wildwood employee of having sex with a person serving a sentence in DOC custody.
The charges against the ex-employees, 40-year-old Jessica Schroeder and 27-year-old Amanda Caban, date back to an incident last June in which an inmate at Wildwood was allegedly found to be in possession of controlled substances.
Charging documents say Dylan Wright — who is serving a decades-long sentence for robbery and assault — attacked and injured a correctional officer who seized the drugs from him at the pretrial facility. Wright was at Wildwood for three days before he was transferred to Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, according to DOC spokesperson Betsy Holley. The correctional officer, Andrew Kerr, was sent to Central Peninsula Hospital with injuries to his hand.
At the time, Wright was charged on four misdemeanor counts. The state says it then began an investigation into the case.
A separate set of charging documents, filed last week, says Wright and Schroeder were found to be in possession of suboxone. A spokesperson for the state Department of Law, Patty Sullivan, said Schroeder was found to be passing suboxone to Wright at Wildwood.
Suboxone is a prescription drug used to treat opioid addiction. Some jails and prisons in the Alaska correctional system have opioid use treatment programs; Wildwood Pretrial does not. Earlier this spring, a correctional officer at Spring Creek in Seward was charged for bringing buprenorphine — another drug used to treat opioid addiction — into the prison there.
The state also charged Schroeder and Caban with having sexual contact with a person in DOC custody who was serving a sentence with an ankle monitor. Schroeder is also facing three seemingly unrelated drug charges.
Schroeder and Caban are no longer employed by DOC, according to Holley. Both left their jobs at Wildwood shortly after the alleged incident — Schroeder on July 1, 2022, and Caban on June 25, 2022.